The Privilege

Kate Malloy has all the proof. She is not allowed to say a word.

Seven months after the case that cost her a partnership, Kate is running a two-room practice on the third floor of a building on Jackson Street. Her new client is Dennis Kolar — an insurance man facing fourteen counts of federal fraud, abandoned by the lawyer his employer paid for, mortgaging his mothers house to defend himself. For nineteen years Kolar kept a copy of every document that crossed his desk. Forty-one boxes, in a storage unit he has paid for every month for six years, including the months he had nothing.

Buried in those boxes is a fire.

March 2019. A three-flat on the South Side, ninety-two percent empty. One woman dead — the last tenant, the one who wouldnt leave. A twenty-four-year-old convicted on a jailhouse informant, a witness who wasnt sure until she was, and the testimony of a certified fire investigator who swore the fire was set.

The same investigator who told the insurance company, in writing, that it was an accident.

Andre Coleman is serving forty years. Kate can prove he didnt do it — and she cannot tell a prosecutor, a judge, a reporter, or the mans sister, who has been writing to every defense attorney in Chicago for seven years and once wrote to her. The proof reached Kate through a client who will not consent, and whose refusal is not cowardice but arithmetic.

There is no exception in the rule. There is one lawful road, and it runs through a frightened, meticulous man who has spent his whole life keeping receipts.

THE PRIVILEGE is a legal thriller about the distance between the truth and what a court is permitted to hear — and about what it costs, measured in months, to move a single sheet of paper from one building to another.

Book two of the Kate Malloy novels. Approximately 29,000 words.